Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The host's wife chipped in, 'Well, that's enough of that. I think it's time we went back down to the paddock.'

The dung was dried, desiccated.

The line drawn on the map had served Eddie Wroughton well. At each village close to the pencil line they had stopped and Wroughton had stayed in the vehicle, forcing the police officer to go among the mud-brick homes. The routine had led them to the last village, then on to the single isolated building. There had been signs there of recent use, and the fire that had been lit. He'd photographed the interior, then the new bolt and the new lock on the inside of the door.

No shepherd or goatherd would have sealed a window so thoroughly, then lit a fire inside, or would have used a new lock and a new bolt on a shed door. They had gone on, following the pencil line on the map, using ever rougher tracks.

The toe of his brogue brushed the top of a dung stool, which fell away as powdery dust. But he worked with the toe until he had exposed the stool's underside, where there was still dampness. A week, a little more perhaps, but not a month. From the dung, he decided that more than half a dozen, fewer than a dozen camels had been there, had waited, had defecated. Near to the riverbed there were tyremarks but on the dirt track; Wroughton could not have said whether they were a week, a month, or half a year old. Away to the right there was a cluster of buildings from which cooking smoke spiralled, and there were irrigated fields. That community would be centred on a well. The police officer had been there and had come back with his head down, as if he felt ashamed to report back that his questions had met a wall of silence. If he was given time, if Wroughton had allowed the police officer the time to take two of the older men away from the village and drive them to the cells at the station back down the road, the questions would still have gone unanswered, so he did not permit it. The wall of silence denied that strangers had been there within the last several days. Tribesmen and farmers, his experience of the hardship of their lives told him, did not respond to inflicted pain.

Slowly, taking his time, Wroughton gazed around him. His eyes were shaded by his dark glasses and he could look out over the ground from which the sun reflected. When he was satisfied with what he had drunk in, seen nothing that interested him, he turned and began again. He looked for the mistakes that men made. A discarded wrapper, a ground-out cigarette filter tip: men who thought their precautions were total always made one mistake. Most of Wroughton's life was dictated by paper: paper accumulated on his desk, was spewed out by cypher machines and his computer. From the paper mountain came clues to the identity and relevance of the prey he hunted, but only rarely. He turned again, stared up at the high ground on the right side of the riverbed, and saw the movement.

Horns moved, then ears, a head and then the goat was gone from . a ledge above the right side of the riverbed.

Wroughton looked hard at the ledge and saw that it reached precariously a patch of green and yellow grass, and that there were more goals. According to his father, grandfather and great-uncle, the best work of an intelligence officer was in close-quarters observation

– they might not have thought him suitable to follow them, not thought he could hack it as a career, but he had remembered. Where there were goats there would be a boy. He had left the villagers to the police officer, but this was for himself.

He scrambled up the loose stone. He clung to the branches of little sprouting bushes that grew from rock crannies. His best brogues were scraped, his linen suit was dust-smeared and his pure-white shirt was sweat-soaked, but he reached the ledge. Never looking down, he edged along the rock wall to where a small plateau opened out. On it, extraordinarily, there was grass. Perhaps a tiny spring dribbled water from the upper rocks. There were goats, and a boy was sitting on the grass among their excrement. He caught his breath. The occasions when excitement had gripped him were rare enough for him to count on the fingers of one hand. The boy watched him as he composed himself. He spoke in Arabic, with the gentleness he would have used to his friend Juan Gonsalves' children.

Twenty minutes later, Eddie Wroughton left the plateau, came back along the ledge, then started the descent to the riverbed. To break his fall, he snatched at the little bushes, slid on his backside in an avalanche of dust and stones. Those who had bought camels from a farmer had not looked up and spied a goat high above them. His suit jacket was torn at the elbows, his trousers at the knees and seat.

It mattered nothing. The boy had seen the men and their voices had carried faintly to him. They had been strangers. The camels had waited in the riverbed and had dropped their dung while an argument had raged over the price of the three more camels needed to move boxes, six boxes. Ten of the twenty minutes with the boy were taken with his questioning, so softly done, over the size, shape and colour of the boxes. Five of the twenty minutes concerned the detail of the features and physique of the young man who had closed the negotiations.

Unrecognizable to those who knew him, unwashed and his clothes not changed, Eddie Wroughton boarded the last flight of the day out of Muscat. At the back of a near-empty aircraft, he thought of the centuries-old trail that had been the route of the frankincense traders half a millennium before. His pencil had traced a line beyond the watercourse, over the hills, into the Empty Quarter. Nine camels,a guide and his son, four men and six crates of weapons were now on the trail. He had much to be cheerful about, but pride of place went to the boy's description of a young man unlike any Arab he had seen before.

On the screen, the image of the Land Rover flashed for a moment, and was gone; then the camera was tracking over sand again.

Lizzy-Jo didn't point out the Land Rover, painted blue with two vivid green stripes running diagonally up its sides and over its roof.

Marty was doing a banking left turn. She did not want to disturb him while he made the manoeuvres to bring First Lady on to the line-up for landing. She'd been in the Land Rover, been driven from the shop to the club in it – where she'd been lectured about meteorites; Lizzy-Jo grimaced. Marty was hunched over his stick, and his eyes, magnified by the thickness of his lenses, squinted in concentration.

The former Air Force pilots for whom she'd done sensor work in her first days with the Agency had flown the newer Predator MQ-ls like they'd have driven cars on a quiet country road up-state, but Marty always had the look on him that it was life or death.

He made a good landing.

She always clapped when he brought First Lady or Carnival Girl down. It was her routine, had been since the first time they'd flown together out of Bagram. The sound of her clapping reverberated in the Ground Control Station. He blushed, as he had the first time. She reached over and squeezed his upper shoulder, as if she could loosen the tensed muscles.

He taxied her back. He cut the pusher engine. They had flown First Lady for eight hours, covering some six hundred nautical miles. The camera had photographed sand and more sand and nothing but sand: flat sand, steep sand and sloping sand. On the workbench, between them, was the big map with the squares on it and she put a Chinagraph cross over two more. There were six squares now with crosses on them, and ninety-four without. The big man from the embassy had talked of thousands of flying map boxes, but that was because he did not understand the Predator's capability. Lizzy-Jo had divided the desert into a hundred squares. Her eyes ached from gazing at the screen. She stood and arched her back.